Down the SharePoint Rabbithole: News for Tues.

For the love of SharePoint, and our legions of loyal readers, we’ve been scurrying around the Internet today looking down rabbit holes and scouting new routes. Here’s some news we saw relating to SharePoint and Office 365. You never know--it might come in handy!

#1: SQL Server 2014 RTM Announced

Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2014 was released to manufacturing and will be generally available on April 1. To learn more about the much-awaited, new in-memory OLTP technology and hybrid cloud capabilities, and other SQL Server 2014 features, visit SQL Server Pro's Michael Otey's article.

#2: Search Matters

Enterprise search solution provider RAVN Systems announced RAVN Connect Foundation, which surfaces content across an organization, including formal document management systems as well as file shares.

It joins a stable of search solutions, including a SharePoint-oriented solution, RAVN Connect for Microsoft SharePoint, which deploys a satellite agent at each remote location and performs local ingestion and enrichment of content and metadata, which is then pushed to the central SharePoint installation.  To learn more, see the RAVN website. 

#3: Making SharePoint Easier to Use

So you thought SharePoint was hard to use? Consider those who are vision impaired. The American Foundation for the Blind's product evaluation lab issued findings of its review of Discover 508 for SharePoint software.

The lab compared OOTB SharePoint in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online/Office 365 with Discover 508 for SharePoint, a software solution designed to make SharePoint easier to use. After an extensive review, AFB Tech concluded in its preliminary report: "We highly recommend that organizations using SharePoint consider adding Discover 508 to their environment to enable their visually and cognitively impaired workers to utilize all of the great collaborative features of SharePoint." To learn more, visit Discover Technologies. For more on the lab findings, visit www.afb.org.

#4: SharePoint Online Storage Increases

Microsoft recently provided more clarity about the SharePoint Online storage improvements it announced at SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas in early March. The improvements are as follows:

The updates will be rolling out live “over the coming weeks” Mark Kashman wrote on March 14. To learn more, visit the Office 365 team blog.